Top 100 Quotes About Minimum Wage
#1. Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax. If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, 'I'm going to pay a little bit more'? That is neighborliness.
Barack Obama
#2. These vessels are out of sight, out of mind. They are exempt from minimum-wage requirements, from Coast Guard inspections, OSHA regulations and other safety laws.
Steve Finley
#3. You get paid more at McDonald's than you do under the existing minimum wage.
Norm Coleman
#4. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 will benefit about 28 million workers across the country. And it will help businesses, too - raising the wage will put more money in people's pockets, which they will pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services in their communities.
Thomas Perez
#5. I eat excellent bread, clean meat, good crisp veggies, organic fruits and nice wine and cheese. It is one of the things I am truly grateful for. I'm not kidding. You can't ask a single mother of three working two jobs for minimum wage to eat that way. I am lucky.
Rachael Taylor
#7. I believe in raising the minimum wage and equal pay for work.
Hillary Clinton
#8. Sometimes one has to be humble enough to start at the bottom with a minimum-wage job even if you have a college degree. Once you get your foot in the door, you can prove your worth and rapidly move up the ladder. If you never get in the door, it is unlikely that you will rise to the top.
Ben Carson
#9. When I was a student at Princeton University, I was working part time in a grocery store. I saw an ad for teachers of a prep course. I don't remember what it paid, but it was easily double or triple the minimum wage.
John Katzman
#10. There's no question raising the minimum wage excessively causes a loss of jobs.
Mitt Romney
#11. If you're fighting against a minimum wage increase, you're fighting an uphill battle, because most Americans, even most Republicans, are okay with raising the minimum wage.
Frank Luntz
#12. When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business.
Fred DeLuca
#13. The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.
Nick Hanauer
#14. Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer.
Dan Aykroyd
#15. The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don't own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks.
Douglas Rushkoff
#16. I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities.
Ben Wikler
#17. The last thing we need to do, relating to teachers, is the key to a good education in this country is a strong teacher. I would have a minimum wage for all our teachers, $40,000 per year.
Bill Richardson
#18. By raising the minimum wage in California, 700,000 people are going to lose their jobs. There are a lot of opportunities for companies to prosper in Florida and compete here, and that's what I'm going after.
Rick Scott
#19. Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, but it's a popular thing to do as well.
Nancy Pelosi
#20. Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job.
Peter Schiff
#21. Pay minimum wage, you get minimum work. Nobody seems to get that.
Sue Grafton
#22. We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage.
Iris Dement
#23. House Republican leadership have refused to allow a clean minimum wage vote. Close to 15 million Americans will be affected if we did this. Do Republicans really expect a family to live on less than $11,000 a year?
Bill Pascrell
#24. I know in the past Republicans have agreed to minimum-wage increases that there's built-in protections for small and midsize businesses.
Marco Rubio
#25. If I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation, so that way, everybody knows what they can count on.
Fred DeLuca
#26. I heard Russell Simmons say that, 'people have million dollar dreams with a minimum wage work ethic.' Basically, everybody wanna be rich but don't nobody wanna work for it.
Yo Gotti
#27. I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.
Newt Gingrich
#28. We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. The minimum wage now in our country, I think we've set that, so there are a lot of people have benefited from it in our country, but I think we ought to review how much it ought to be, and whether or not we ought to have increases in the minimum wage.
Linda McMahon
#30. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
Nick Hanauer
#31. The difference between the very wealthy and the working poor has grown. We raise that minimum wage and we move forward with the vision of this president that we have, which is everyone pays their fair share.
Barbara Boxer
#32. In my view, we need a massive federal jobs program which puts millions of our people back to work. We must end our disastrous trade policies. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. And we have to fight for pay equity for women.
Bernie Sanders
#33. Lawmakers zealously guard their prerogatives, and as much as some might oppose a minimum-wage increase, they will not want to see the issue taken out of their hands.
Eric Schneiderman
#34. The minimum wage is not something that you want to stay on as a permanent basis. For example, if you have a minimum wage job, you don't stay there 20 or 30 years. You don't put your children through college working on minimum wage.
John Raese
#35. No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.
Jon Corzine
#36. You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.
William J. Clinton
#37. My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.
Elizabeth Warren
#38. I know how to create and make people feel something. Honestly, if I didn't do this, I would just have some minimum-wage job in New Mexico, and I would go out on the weekends and make just enough money to pay my insurance and pay for a couple beers, and that would be it.
Freddie Prinze Jr.
#39. Mr. Speaker, the time for an increase in the minimum wage has not just arrived; it is long overdue.
Sherwood Boehlert
#40. Oftentimes when you have the federal government or others step in and start to raise minimum wage, what happens is you take away or reduce some people's opportunity to grab the bottom rung of the economic ladder to get the opportunities and the skills that you need to move up that economic ladder.
Kevin Madden
#41. I think that if it is.. has to do with global warming, or if it has to do with raising the minimum wage, or if it has to do with lowering prescription drugs for vulnerable citizens.. all of those things are people issues, not Democratic issues or Republican issues.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#42. I think the right-wingers have to buddy up to the fact that either the minimum wage has to go up, and people get enough money to live, or you're always going to have people needing government assistance. You can't have it both ways.
Bill Maher
#43. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.
Barack Obama
#44. I thought in this country, the best social program was a job. Yet minimum wage jobs aren't paying enough to keep families out of poverty.
Barbara Mikulski
#45. A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.
Rex Curry
#46. Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.
Marco Rubio
#47. Obama's gonna play Santa Claus with the minimum wage. He's got no successes to brag about. He cannot talk about a robust job market. In fact, the very fact he's talking about the minimum wage is evidence there is no robust job market.
Rush Limbaugh
#48. He woulda hired the Boston Strangler if he'd've worked for minimum wage.
Stephen King
#49. Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American Dream. And our current government programs, offer at best only a partial solution. They help people deal with poverty, but they do not help them escape it.
Marco Rubio
#50. The minimum wage isn't earned only by people working at fast food restaurants and in service industry work - the average income for positions like nursing assistants, preschool teachers and paramedics are all under $15.
David Rolf
#51. Though you may be paid minimum wage, to the customers you are the face of the entire company.
Sophia Amoruso
#52. The Republicans believe in the minimum wage
the more the minimum, the better.
Harry Truman
#53. Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
Christina Romer
#54. Today a minimum wage earner has to work a day and a half just to pay for a full tank of gas. That is simply shameful.
Bill Pascrell
#55. The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.
Thomas Sowell
#56. There are people who would like to get rid of minimum wage. But we have to have it, because if we didn't some people would not get paid money. They would work all week for two loaves of bread and some Spam.
Chris Rock
#57. A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.
Milton Friedman
#58. The first to come and the last to go, working for that minimum wage.
Jackson Browne
#59. The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.
Milton Friedman
#60. Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.
Thomas Perez
#62. I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.
John Sununu
#63. A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.
Steve Hanke
#64. I was at the forefront of the effort to pass $15 minimum wage in Seattle, and have been collaborating with the people who are trying to make that happen across the country.
Nick Hanauer
#65. If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine.
Marco Rubio
#66. Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They're all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.
Noam Chomsky
#67. MILWAUKEE- President Barack Obama went to Milwaukee on Monday to talk up an improving economy and push Congress to boost the minimum wage.
Anonymous
#68. Don't let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs,
Hillary Clinton
#69. We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.
Henry Ford
#70. We took the position we wanted our people to be better than minimum wage, so we're going to pay better than minimum wage, and we still do that.
Kenneth Langone
#71. The minimum wage is something that F.D.R. put in place a long time ago during the Great Depression. I don't think it worked then. It didn't solve any problems then and it hasn't solved any problems in 50 years.
John Raese
#72. Ohio is one of only two states that have a minimum wage below the federal level of $5.15 an hour.
Sherrod Brown
#73. My wife and I decided to try and kick start our kitchens to a $15 minimum wage for cooks. I've probably had to go through and raise every menu price now by 50 cents because it took away my profit. I just underestimated what it was going to cost.
Tom Douglas
#74. I was making almost minimum wage on 'The Young and the Restless.' But it was my first job, so I accepted my first quote. I had a great time on it, and it obviously led me to better things.
Eva Longoria
#75. Raising the minimum wage isn't just pro-worker; it's pro-economic growth.
Thomas Perez
#76. Home Depot has never hired one human being for minimum wage, not one. We have always paid a premium over minimum wage.
Kenneth Langone
#77. The minimum wage was enacted in 1937 during the Great Depression and it has been increased 16 times. It's a well-established economic policy to help families.
John Freeman
#78. If the opponents of an increase in the minimum wage were correct, then every time you fly to Seattle, you've got to bring a bagged lunch because there shouldn't be any restaurants because they should have all have gone out of business as a result of raising the minimum wage.
Thomas Perez
#79. To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise,
Barack Obama
#80. Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers.
Lenny Bruce
#81. The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.
Jerry Brown
#82. Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing - and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.
Thomas Sowell
#83. I'll commit suicide before I vote on a clean minimum-wage bill,
John Boehner
#84. We should raise the minimum wage so that no one who works full time has to live in poverty
Barack Obama
#85. Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.
Edmund Phelps
#86. Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.
Joseph Stiglitz
#87. The state of Alaska has a minimum wage which is higher than the federal level because our state leaders have made that determination.
Joe Miller
#88. Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.
Nick Hanauer
#89. In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.
Elizabeth Warren
#90. I thought I was gonna be in the minimum-wage working world all my life.
Henry Rollins
#92. To all you who believe we shouldn't have a minimum wage
that the minimum amount you can be paid should be determined solely by your employer, we tried it once before: it was called slavery.
Quentin R. Bufogle
#93. It's your decision to work for less than minimum wage
D. Jackson
#94. The way China is looking to boost consumer spending is astounding. They are going to boost the minimum wage by 13 percent a year every year for five years ... I don't know if people realize how dramatic that is.
William Fung
#95. What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That's not right in America.
John F. Kerry
#96. Congress has not raised the minimum wage since 1997. The minimum wage is now at its lowest level in 50 years adjusted for inflation.
Russ Carnahan
#97. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Carl Bernstein
#98. I think the minimum wage will be the centerpiece of the State of Union. I think it should be the centerpiece of the State of the Union. And it should be very focused on that because, as you said, Republicans in the rest of the country are for it.
Robert Gibbs
#99. It is time this Congress listened to the American people and minimum-wage workers, and it is time that we act.
Russ Carnahan
#100. Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.
Tom DeLay
